


the walls were for safety, they said

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [86]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Betrayal of Various Kinds, Brotherly Love, Gen, Ghost Concepts, Grief, Loss, Maedhros isn't here but he's all most of them can think about, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, everyone at Mithrim is Not Having a Good Time, takes place directly after "dirgemaker"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-03-29 15:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19022821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: They have three days, and then the rest of their lives.





	1. Curufin

The blood is drying in Celegorm's hair and growing wetter on Celegorm's chest, and yet it is all the same color: black in a grey dawn.

Curufin looks at the claw-hand tangled in his brother's shirt with distaste, wondering how it came to cling there so fiercely, and then he remembers that the hand is his own.

The woman didn't scream, and Curufin wishes they had had time to learn if she was the screaming kind. He wishes, and he takes his hand away, and now his hand is red like both of Celegorm's.

Celegorm has not stopped weeping.

"We must go," Curufin says, because Maglor is as white as unwritten paper and the children are clinging to each other and Celegorm--

(If someone, _anyone,_ isn't careful, Celegorm is going to break Curufin's foolish heart.)

"Yes." Maglor's voice is stronger than expected. Harder. And yet as with all things that make Maglor himself, it is a fragile hardness, more of a shell than a steely center. It will not last the night, but _they_ must.

Curufin puts his hand on Celegorm's chest again, and Celegorm dodges away. "It's a scratch," he says thickly, through the endless flow of tears. He's not even sobbing. It is as if he no longer knows what his body is doing.

_Your brother has a queer habit..._

Curufin makes his mind as silent as the fading moon and steps to where the corpse lies. If she has a soul, he wonders if it is already burning. She was here and now she isn't, and that is not so different from all the other deaths, except she was someone who found pleasure in suffering.

Curufin turns her head over with his foot and it parts along her spine like an overripe fruit dropping from the vine.

Her eyes are still open.

Curufin's eyes are open, too.

 

_Do I have to miss him?_

_Who?_  Mother asked, putting aside the armbands she was stitching for the twins. She said they were too young for all black, but no one was too young to die or to know someone dead. Curufin had said that because the locked forge meant nobody else would.

 _Grandfather._ He whispered it.

Mother had a way of looking at him, like she did not like what she saw. The look did not hurt in the same way the sun did not burn, if one kept hidden under a tree. _What do you mean?_

 _I don't want to miss him,_ Curufin said. It wasn't fair, that he couldn't speak of this to--

 

Maglor says nothing more as they mount their horses. Maglor's chin is dipped almost to his chest.

 _Three days_ , Curufin thinks, and almost says aloud. _You've three days, to get used to the idea--_

Celegorm twists the reins around his hands. "We have three days to save him," he mutters, which is not what Curufin meant at all. Then, when Maglor does not answer, Celegorm clears his throat and says again, more clearly, "They have no word to send now, by faster roads. I shall take Curufin with me, and we shall hunt--"

Why will Celegorm not let _him_ go? Curufin would rather think of a dark ravine, so dark that the depths (and what falls there) cannot be seen. They should all be grateful that the death would be quick and the face destroyed.

They should all be grateful.

"Hunt where?" Maglor demands, wheeling in the saddle. "You said you did not know."

"I would not have been able to track _her_ to Bauglir, I said." Celegorm's voice is shaking. Curufin has seen men die and he has seen many things that look, too late, like dying. Maedhros looked like that, for months before the end.

Maedhros is in a ravine, if three days mean nothing. "But if I--"

"If you what?" Caranthir asks eagerly, leaning forward in his saddle, because he and Amras are stupid enough that they do not understand, _even now_ , what the set of Maglor's face _means_.

(Hours ago, Curufin heard Amras screaming. The sound was far away.)

Celegorm falls off his horse very loose-limbed, not shaking at all.

 

There was poison on the knife. And that's just _it_ , that's exactly what they should have expected from a sharp-toothed harpy who dragged their brother so low. Maedhros let himself be dragged, of course, which none of the rest of them will ever acknowledge, and then Athair had to _save_ him, and how much, how much is changed by all these faults? All these failures?

Celegorm's face is pale and his eyes are closed.

Curufin swears, stick-pin-sharp, and hisses, and slaps him. Undoes his collar. Says, _Celegorm, Celegorm, Celegorm_ , and squeezes his hot, blood-crusted hands.

"Back to Mithrim," Maglor shouts, all hard and _fragile_ , not enough to last a night. "Get him back to Mithrim."

Celegorm rode like this, with his arms around Athair's waist. Curufin buries his face against his brother's rumpled leather coat. Celegorm is tall, and strong, and when unconscious--heavy.

The weight is almost more than Curufin can bear.

 

The ride to Mithrim is long, but no longer than when Athair was--when Athair was--

And the ride to Mithrim is dark, but no darker than when they were asleep and Amrod was running away, when Amrod was running at all. (What will Celegorm not say? What is he keeping locked within him, simple and stern-minded as he is?)

Curufin's nose is jolted in his skull as he presses it against the back of Celegorm's fallen-forward neck. Celegorm's neck is warm. He's still alive. The wound was a scratch, it wasn't deep, Curufin would have known if it was deep. (Would have known, and staunched it. Would have saved him anyway.)

In this dark, Maedhros's hair might burn torch-bright, and the teethmarks on his throat might stand out like the wounds they really are.

Maedhros might be here, if Maedhros had not such a foolish heart and a ready soul and none of the strength to bind the two together.

 _She was right,_ Curufin would say to him, over and over again until he knew his brother was hurt. _She was right about you. You always thought you could give everything, but you always made everything worse._

His brother is dead (three days), so Curufin won't wish him here. Curufin won't miss him.

 

 _You don't ever have to feel alone in the mine_ , Athair said, in March. Curufin was turning sixteen, but numbers like that didn't matter. Just like memories didn't matter unless they were sharp and quick enough to shape, to cut. _Not with your skill._

 _Do you ever feel alone, Athair?_ He asked that because it was just the two of them. Because Athair was smiling and looked both old and young.

Athair shook his head, sharp and quick.

 

"Open the gates!" Maglor calls. Celegorm's voice would sound the command better. Celegorm is still warm, but that is all Curufin can say for him. Well, that, and _he is not dying. He is not going to die._

The sentries on the bridge asked no questions. The sentries at the gate mutter among themselves. Their eyes are on Celegorm. No pity. Curufin was not present for the commotion, but he heard--a little. Just a little.

If the harlot messenger is still within Mithrim's walls, perhaps they should slit her throat too.

(When Celegorm wakes, Curufin will ask him what it felt like, opening flesh so.)

(Or maybe he won't.)

"To the sickroom," Maglor snaps, but there is his first flaw. Maglor's body remembers he is useless before his mind does. Horseless, he does not rush to Celegorm's side--Caranthir does. Caranthir's awkward arms trying to be helpful, Caranthir with a sheen of sticky sweat on his brow. Curufin's lip curls for the both of them.

"Not the sickroom." Not with Rumil, who does not wake. Rumil who threw away his life, to save no others. Curufin smiles at Maglor, to see how long it takes his brother to break. "When Celegorm wakes, no telling what he'll do." This, low enough that no one else in the listening walls can hear. Curufin meant what he said in that shadowy parlay; he always means what he says. They need Mithrim as surely as Mithrim needs them.

They go to Athair's room. It is Curufin's now by right, but he won't think of it so. He won't think too much of anything.

 

Celegorm's coat is stripped away and his shirt, too. The wound has stopped bleeding, but it has a sick color at the edges and is beginning to smell putrid. Amras shies away, hands over his mouth. Curufin can't look much at Amras without wanting badly to ask someone (Celegorm) what Amras (Amrod) looks like dead.

Celegorm is surely the closest to knowing.

_I found--nothing._

When Celegorm wakes...

One of the healers is called in (Curufin allows that, though grudgingly). The man agrees that the wound was poisoned. A basin of water and a dishes of herbs are brought. The wound is cleaned and bandaged. Celegorm tosses and turns, or he would, if Caranthir and Curufin did not hold his arms down.

Celegorm does not deserve this. Celegorm did not whore himself out to Athair's enemies. Celegorm has never been weak, even when he looks like dying.

Curufin strokes his brow when it is over, glaring at Caranthir until Caranthir flushes and shuffles back, closer to Amras, who will not tire of him and his graceless hulking. Curufin whispers lower than any words,

_I will keep you strong._

 

The mine was always lonely.

Curufin missed the forge, and the fire within it.

 

"You should sleep," Caranthir says to Maglor, and Maglor's throat emits something that is not a laugh nor yet a sob.

(The breath left the body quickly.)

"I'll never sleep again," he says.

"Then you will die," Curufin murmurs, so as not to disturb Celegorm. (Perhaps he should speak louder?) "Do you want to die, Maglor? Do you think it right, to leave us behind in pursuit of something you would call relief?"

Maglor face might as well be torn in two. That kind of grief will scar. His jaw works and he does not answer. He goes to stand by the sole window in Athair's room, treading on the bedroll Curufin used for months (and still uses).

There will be breaking for Maglor, yet, though he is already broken.

Three days will pass quickly and cruelly, carving permanence into their lives. Curufin would rather think of all the days after that.


	2. Caranthir

Celegorm doesn’t wake up in the morning.

The scratch on his chest is still angry and raw, and a fever burns through him so that his filthy hair is drenched in sweat. The smell of the sickroom is not the smell of a deathbed, but Caranthir mislikes it just the same.

Yet—he stays.

He stays even while Amras lies alongside Huan on the floor, eyes blank. He stays though Maglor has stepped out into the morning light, and may be wandering near lake or field or Athair's grave by now.

He stays even while Curufin watches him with jealous eyes.

Curufin hates him, Caranthir knows. Curufin hates all of them, save Athair, and Celegorm, who may be—

“He does not need you here,” Curufin hisses at last. “Both of you, breathing like the dog.”

Amras is silent. Caranthir is not sure if he is even listening.

“We have nowhere else to go,” Caranthir answers, speaking for them both. “So we will not.”

(He has his room, his and the twins and Celegorm's, but he does not want to be alone.)

(His saint medal is what he will find there, cast aside like a bent coin.)

He has nowhere else to go.

“You don’t want to believe it, do you?” Curufin asks softly, taking a familiar tack.  _Questions._  “That Maedhros is dead.”

Amras sits up so sharply that Huan barks, just once.

“Shut up!” cries Amras thinly. There is so little left of his voice after all his sobbing, all his screaming.

Curufin ignores him, and addresses Caranthir again. “You won’t blame him,” he says. “When he wakes up, you won’t blame Celegorm.” As he speaks, he strokes the filthy hair back from Celegorm's brow.

“For what?” _See, I can ask questions, too._

“For Maedhros.” Curufin’s eyes look like Athair’s eyes, sometimes, and sometimes they are too calculating for that. “It isn’t Celegorm’s fault that Maedhros was weak.”

“He was— _isn’t._ ”

“Wasn't he?” Curufin clings ruthlessly to past tense. “He certainly wasn’t the angel you like to think him. He killed more men than any of us. Drank like a fish. Likely had more women than most of the men in this fort.”

Caranthir flinches—he can't help it. He can’t stop thinking of Maedhros with a bullet in his forehead...and it shouldn’t matter nearly as much, but he also can't stop thinking of the way the woman smiled when she spoke his brother's name.

Curufin smiles, too. “Don't pretend you don’t know. Maedhros let her mark him, just like she said. And he probably thought he deserved it, after letting that slut fu—”

Caranthir has moved across the room before the word, that terrible ugly word, has left his little brother's mouth. He doesn’t even realize what he's done until Curufin is kicking viciously at his shins and Caranthir sees his own hands fisted in his brother's collar, dragging him to his feet.

(This, like everything else these days, seems to happen backwards.)

Amras is shaking on the floor with his arms around his knees and Curufin is smiling his awful smile and Caranthir wishes they were all dead along with Athair, along with—

(Is this despair?)

Then Curufin goes stiff. “Caranthir,” he says, not petty or cruel at all, but very stern, “Stop.”

He is looking at something over Caranthir’s shoulder. It might be a trick—Caranthir’s bruised legs suggest it is—but he looks anyway, and lets his brother go.

Ulfang, master of Rumil’s men and likely of Rumil’s fort, stands in the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” he says heavily, “to intrude.”

Caranthir feels his face getting hot and red, as it always does, and he clears his throat. But Curufin speaks first, still too smooth and too old.

“What brings you here?”

“Your brother’s health. I heard he was wounded when you went on the girl’s errand.”

“What errand?” Curufin demands, as if the truth of the matter is not known. Amras has scrambled to his feet and Caranthir feels his hand slip in his. He is selfishly glad—

But of what? That Amras still has it in him to seek touch? That Amras seeks Caranthir?

_It is only because Maedhros is gone._

 

_“You are more than enough,” Maedhros says, and kisses his brow._

_Maedhros is too perfect, too bright, too beautiful to love Caranthir. And yet he does_ —or he did.

 

Ulfang seems not to have expected Curufin’s honeyed hostility. He must not have known Athair very well up close. What looked like mad genius was carefully pointed by watchful distrust. His sons inherited scraps of both.

(Two weeks ago, Athair was hale and living.)

Caranthir squeezes Amras’s hand, to keep both of them standing.

“Have the healers seen to him?”

“Yes,” Curufin answers. “He has woken, and was much better. He is only sleeping, now.” All lies.

Ulfang ducks his head, so that his stiff black beard is bent against his shirtfront. “I’m right glad to hear it,” he says. “You tell me what you need for him, and I’ll see it done.”

They do not speak while his footsteps echo down the hall. They do not speak while Curufin tiptoes to the door and shuts it. When he turns back, his eyes are wild.

“We can’t let anyone else in,” he says. “We can’t trust anyone.”

“I thought you said we needed them,” Caranthir replies stupidly. “I thought you said—”

“We do,” Curufin snaps, “But we won’t always. We just have to _survive_ until then, you _ape_. We just have to fucking _survive_.” He buries his face in his hands.

He doesn’t look like Athair at all.

Caranthir looks from Celegorm’s slack face to shaking Curufin to Amras’s white-knuckled hand in his. Huan is standing at alert by the bedside.

Even with Huan, they are too few. Too few of them are left.

Two weeks ago—

One week—

_Three days._

The sob is rising in Caranthir’s throat. If he lets it out, he will no longer be an older brother, he is sure. Curufin already dares him to give way, and Amras cannot be made to suffer the loss of another hand to hold.

Gently, Caranthir takes his hand away.

“I am going to find Maglor,” he says. He looks at Amras as he says it, so that Amras may be assured he is coming back, but he speaks for Curufin to hear.

Curufin walks to sit at Celegorm’s head again. His walk is somehow like limping.

Amras says nothing. He curls up by Huan again. Huan huffs a great dog sigh, and it is his eyes and none other that follow Caranthir out of the room.

 

Their quarters are near Rumil’s study, which is at the farthest end of the Fort. That means that they are far from the sickroom, which abuts the dining and meeting hall in the wide, short branch of the building. Caranthir, in the days spent waiting for Maedhros—and Amrod, whom Celegorm swears he knows to be dead—spent some time by Rumil’s bed.

Rumil has opened his eyes a few times, the healers say, but the arrow struck his spine, and the poison did still worse, and he neither moves nor speaks.

The woman said she would exchange Maedhros for Rumil.

The woman is dead.

_...he has desired death a long time hence, has he not?_

Caranthir presses his ever-scraped knuckles against his mouth, but the tears won’t stop.

He runs, boots too heavy on the floor, neither silent nor safe as Curufin or Celegorm (or Maedhros) would tell him to move. He bursts out the side-door that fronts on the sparring courtyard, and from there he does not stop running until he reaches the lower field.

He said he would find Maglor, and he will, but not yet.

 

Athair’s grave is still fresh. So fresh. Will the soil never settle? Will grass never grow here, because it knows when fire lies beneath it?

(Maedhros and Amrod will never have graves.)

“I’d save you if I could,” Caranthir says aloud. There is no wind on this flat, awful, blue-skied day. Not here in the lower field. “But I’m not Celegorm. I don’t know how.”

That, and he is too afraid.

 

(Maedhros must have been afraid so many times, but Caranthir only knows that now. He never _believed_ it before.)

 

_He probably thought he deserved it._

Curufin is a little snake, but he isn’t always a liar.

_“I love you.”_

_“I know you do. But that does not mean you know what I deserve; quite the opposite, in fact. Love makes us overlook terrible things, you know.”_

Caranthir falls to his knees. The tears bubble out of him like boiling water, like there are so many aching, hacking sobs saved up in him that only now find their way.

He should miss Athair, and he does. Athair was everything that defined them, and they have none of them—least of all Curufin, who pretends that he has—begun to understand what a world without Athair is.

Maybe that is why Caranthir can think only of a world without Maedhros.

 

The ground is dry and warm beneath his cheek. He has fallen asleep here; the light has changed and his skin prickles, for no doubt the side of his face will be sunburned—but no, he cast his sleeve over his eyes.

The guards who patrol the border of Mithrim’s lands must have seen him. One more Feanorian body.

“Caranthir?”

If Curufin’s face is only sometimes Athair’s face, Maglor’s face is scarcely his own. (They are rather alike, sometimes, in sharpness if not in cruelty.)

Caranthir sits up, scrubbing at his gritty eyelids with the heels of his hands. “What?”

 _What,_ as if the mound of fresh soil does not lie close by.

(Maglor said words over this grave, and they were beautiful, but it was all wrong. Athair should not be in the ground, and Maglor should not be the eldest—

And Caranthir should be stronger, even in deciding if he would rather be living or dead.)

“You should not stray outside the fort alone.” Maglor has not been weeping. His eyes are not red.

“Neither should you.” It is a thoughtless thing to say. Maglor is the eldest, now. They must treat him as such.

“How is Celegorm?” Maglor asks, not reacting. Not piqued, as he so often is (was). Still that voice as flat as the still air.

“No better.” Caranthir stands. His knees tremble a little. (He used to think Maedhros’s bones never trembled. He used to think his brother skilled at looking unafraid. The journey west taught him, over and over again, that this was not so.

But Caranthir is blind, and he was late to learn his lessons.)

Side by side, they walk back.

“Do you think the poison is fatal?” Caranthir asks. Maglor’s shoulders tighten. “Her poison? You knew her better.”

“I knew her not at all.”

So. He can still be snappish. Caranthir forges ahead anyway. “You knew _about_ her.”

Maglor wheels on him. They’re the same height, now. “Yes, because I know what her hands and teeth and poison did, what _she_ took from—”

Maglor is not going to say Maedhros’s name.

“Please.” Caranthir is not Curufin. He is not anyone else, and that is rarely a boon, in this family. “I just want to know if Celegorm will—”

“She likes suffering,” Maglor answers. Quieter, not calmer. “A quick kill is not her way.”

_“A pity, to make a corpse of such a man, so soon. Perhaps I can beg from my master a few days’ mercy, so that I can farewell him properly. No one should go to their death feeling unloved, and certainly not a one as fair as that one.”_

Caranthir wants to cut that memory out of himself. He cannot.

He is too old to be innocent, and too young to be blind. He has known more than he admitted for a long time.

Three days, and then a bullet.

If Celegorm dies, he will only have three brothers left.

“We should call in the healers again,” he says. “Curufin distrusts everyone. Ulfang came to ask after Celegorm and Curufin practically chased him from the room. You must set us straight, Maglor. So that Celegorm can live.”

 

_We just have to survive._

 

Maglor stares queerly at him. “Set us straight?”

Caranthir nods, believing. Believing that his eldest brother left can lead.

(In truth, he said he would find Maglor—but he is not certain that he did.)


	3. Amras

It is night, and Amras does not want it to be night at all.

The moon has risen like a polished coin in the waiting sky. If he breathes softly, he can hear crickets, and he can hear the wind, because Mithrim’s windows were shuttered all winter but left open and unglazed in spring.

Night seems to be the hour of death, the hour of losing hold of people.

Amras is sitting on the floor of a room he won’t name. It is almost June. A year ago, they were a family.

Family.

_Athair, Mother, Maitimo, Macalaure, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, Ambarussa._

_I like when you call us the Ambarussa._ This, to Maedhros.

Athair furrowed his brow at the name because he did not know where it came from. Athair knew many things, but if he had known that the cousins began the habit, he might have forbidden it altogether.

 _We shan’t tell._ Amrod’s grin, when their teeth are in or out at the same time, looks probably exactly the same.

... _looks?_

 

Curufin will scarcely speak of Athair. Will scarcely speak of Maedhros, save to mock.

In the moonlight, in the room, Amras turns his hand palm-up. There is a slim white scar in the once-soft (now-calloused) flesh between his fore and middle fingers.

Amrod does not have that scar.

 _Amrod_ , Amras chants in his mind. _Amrod, Amrod, Amrod_.

Celegorm is feverish again. Or, he has been feverish since he fell down (dea--), and now his fever is rising.

 

Will they let Maedhros cover his eyes when they shoot? Will they give him a blindfold?

Will he be tied, or will there be more guns than just the one?

 

 _A bullet,_ said the woman. _A single bullet to ruin that lovely face, and any number of-_ -

 

 _Amrod_. Amras breathes deeply. It makes his sore throat and tired ribs ache.

Also, he is very hungry.

He shouldn't be hungry. They buried Athair days ago. Amras saw him die. Amras isn't a child, he's fourteen and an almost half.

 _Half_.

Not-a-child means knowing that dead stays dead.

 

Maedhros won't cry, Amras knows that. Maedhros won't let them see him cry.

 

_This is how you hold it, so that the recoil doesn’t send you flying._

_If I go flying, you’ll catch me. You’ll catch us._

_Always._ Maedhros smiles.

 

So the moon is rising and the voices of his brothers are gone. All silent means that all could be speaking far off, or none could. Two things can be true at once, like that.

(Two.)

 

 _Eat every crumb of your supper_ , Maedhros told them in the desert, even though he rarely seemed happy to follow his own advice. _You'll need it_.

A man died in the desert.

Now Maedhros is going to die in the mountains, and there will be no one to farewell him, no one to give him his supper. No one to hold his hands. (He always liked it, when they held his hands.)

 

Amras looks at his palm and scrambles to his feet. When Maglor came back, and called the healers, Amras snuck away. He hadn't wanted to be away from them ever again until he...did. Maglor and Curufin were arguing in slithering voices. Maglor looked greenish, sick.

Celegorm did too.

And Curufin looked like a knife-blade, and Caranthir was saying _please, please,_ not like Caranthir at all, and Amras didn't have to be there.

 

In this room, in _his_ room--the one he shares with  Caranthir, and Amrod, and Celegorm, because Celegorm asked Maglor if he might share with _them_ and Maglor said no--something silver glints on the floor.

It is Caranthir's prayer medal.

Amras picks it up before he shuts the door behind him. He shall keep it safe until Caranthir asks for it back.

Amrod still has his prayer medal. (Raphael.)

Amras clasps his own. (Gabriel.)

Maedhros...what does Maedhros have?

 

Maedhros will be shot without his Saint Michael medal.

This makes Amras want to cry very hard, as he has cried these days since, until all the tears within him were spent in salt and rain. What is he, when he weeps like that?

(Half.)

He is still hungry. He tucks the extra medal carefully into his pouch, lifting it by its chain so that it makes no sound. This is like being very careful of a broken bone, or a sore spot left by a missing tooth.

 

_Curufin knocked ‘em out, Mamai--_

 

The Mithrim kitchens are not closed at night, but nor are they strictly open. The assigned cooks--Athair called it _fair division of labor_ \--salt meat and begin its slow roasting over simmering coal-fires. Before-- _before_ \--Amrod and Amras watched them do their work together.

Now Amras does not know if he is welcome. He stands in the shadows.

“Ulfang says you’re not to be hanged from the walls yet, whore,” cuts a sharp voice. A woman’s voice. “Doesn’t mean you’ll get much kindness from us, after what you did. Some of us were fond of him, here.”

Is _him_ Ulfang, or someone else? And who does she call a _whore_? Amras hates the word. It is sharp-edged and cruel. He isn’t quite sure what it means. Mother would never have let it be spoken in her presence, he is certain. Celegorm used to say it, when he was swearing, but it has been some time since Amras has heard it so employed. Celegorm’s swearing is very creative; perhaps he tired of _whore_ and its uses. He says _squirrel’s tit_ and _hound-shit_ instead of _dog-shit_ , out of deference to Huan, and--

The woman speaking is Nora. She has long sandy hair in waving braids and Amras doesn’t like her because Caranthir doesn’t, and Caranthir’s opinions of people are often right.

There is a whimper.

There is another woman standing beside Nora, and yet another woman on the floor, with her arms around her knees and her dark hair tumbling over them.

Nora prods the woman’s knees with her boot. “Did he leave without paying you? There must have been something, to make you turn him over.”

“I never--”

“That’s right. You never. He wouldn’t look twice at the likes of you.” Nora laughs, a sound almost as sharp as her words. “So that was it? You didn’t like to be spurned?”

_Who are they talking about?_

“I’ll go.”

“You shan’t. You mayn’t leave this fort.”

“Best find a bed among the men.” This, from Nora’s companion.

More laughter.

Amras can walk away. He can walk back to his room and the crickets and the silence and

Amrod.

_Amrod Amrod_

_Amrod--_

“Leave her alone.”

His voice will be shrill until he dies, he thinks.

(Is he going to die soon?)

 

It happens like this: Nora smiles and chirps that all is well, her companion hastens away, the woman on the floor rakes the tangle of hair back from her face and goes quite pale.

It does not happen all at once, but Amras feels as if it does.

The woman whom he does not know says--

“ _You?_ ”

 

“She knows Amrod, she _knows_ him!” Amras cries, when Caranthir has opened the sickroom door (Athair’s room) and admitted him. He drags her in with him, the woman who is not even his height, who is small about the waist and shoulders and has a dress cut so low that Amras can see a great deal of what Mother used to call _a figure_ and which Mother also said they were _not to look at, for it was not polite_.

Amras supposes if times were different he might want to look, but he doesn’t care about girls. He isn’t his brothers. He isn’t--any of his brothers--

_Amrod Amrod Amrod Am--_

“What?” Maglor moves like a puppet learning what it is to have strings cut and limbs freed. It is ungraceful. It is like being very careful of a broken bone.

“Begging your pardon,” the woman whispers, when she sees Maglor. Why did she follow Amras? Did she wish only to escape, from Nora’s taunts?

(What is it like, to only want to escape?)

 

_A single_

_Bullet_

 

_It’s alright, bairn, it’s a nightmare only and you don’t have to be afraid, don’t you see the sun, don’t you see your brother there beside you--_

_Mamai?_

 

_Amras? It’s only a nightmare, I’m here, I shan’t go until you are asleep again._

_Maitimo?_

_Yes._

_Maitimo, I’m awake too. Amras woke me up._

_Shhh. Both of you. Sleep._

 

“You saw our brother then,” Maglor demands tightly. Curufin is rubbing Celegorm’s limp fingers between his own, and Caranthir is shadowing Maglor as if the soles of their boots are doomed to follow each other always, and Amras has lost his voice again. He stands, though. He is not curved around himself on the floorboards, as he was when Curufin and Caranthir were fighting.

As the woman was, in the kitchen, all alone in one way and not in another.

She twists her hands together. Is she younger or older than Maglor?

Is she missing a finger? Amras looks closely.

(She is.)

“I saw a young'un as looked like him. It was--it was a fair number of nights ago. I didn’t--”

“Where was he going?” Maglor’s voice cuts like a whip.

“He was looking for the mail-rider, I think. He was awful bold for such--such a--”

“Such a child?” Curufin demands, letting go of Celegorm’s hands, and rising with a coiled swiftness that reminds Amras of a metal spring let go.

(Silver, coin-like moon. Silver, bullet-cartridge. Silver, brother-eyes.)

“Aye.” The girl breathes like sobbing. “I know, I know, he was a child. I’m so sorry, Feanorian.” She looks at Maglor as if he is the only Feanorian here. “I didn’t--”

“Didn’t betray him?” Curufin’s hand is at his hip. There is a gun there. There is always a gun there.

Amras sees his feet moving. Feet, not voice. There are parts of him left that know what they are doing.

 

_Shh. Amras woke me up._

 

This is the girl with the barrel of a gun pressed to her forehead. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I swear to God--”

That is all she can say, maybe.

This is Amras, stepping between her and Curufin, between her and Maglor.

“No.” His voice, his again. “She knows Amrod.”

 

(Maedhros isn’t going to have a blindfold, because the man with the yellow eyes is cruel, and Athair said Melkor Bauglir was crueler still.)

( _He marked my eldest--_

 _\--after marking his heir a whore_ )

 

“Amras, she’s a traitor.” Maglor says tightly.

“Worse than a traitor,” Curufin adds fiercely. “She’s a coward.”

“No.” Amras thinks of Maitimo, thinks of how he shouted at Athair, with his hand on Amras’s shoulder, as if he would never--

_I shan’t go._

“No,” Amras tells them again. _His brothers._ If he shuts his eyes, he can’t see them, and all of them could be here, or none. “Ulfang said she wouldn’t hang from the walls. And she knows Amrod, and she isn’t going to hang ever. She is going to be safe.”

“Amras.” Caranthir clears his throat. “Amrod is...” He doesn’t say--it. Amras will kill him or any of them or himself, no blindfold and no bullet, nothing but his own hands or a knife or whatever it takes, if Caranthir says _that_ to him.

“The whore may live or die, since her use is spent,” Curufin concedes coldly, at last, after a long moment where hands and guns remain stone-still. “Whatever it is, she cannot stay _here_.” He looks at the woman with eyes that are the merit of hands and guns and stones all at once.

Amras watches her go.

_It’s alright. I’m here._

_What?_

 

“Maglor,” Curufin murmurs, returning to the head of the bed, where Celegorm twitches and sweats. “Your littlest brother is going mad.”

Maglor passes his hand over his face.

Amras finds he does not much care what Curufin thinks, now or ever.

 

The clock in the hall of the fort (Athair’s) strikes distant midnight. Thus begins...is it the second day?

Caranthir shivers.

Maglor stands by the window, looking smaller than he did when he threatened the woman and asked her questions.

Amras wishes the woman would come back.

_What did he look like?_

_I’m_ here _, didn’t you hear me?_

_What?_

_I’m here. Look in the mirror._

_I don’t want to._

_Because you’d see me?_

_Stop whining._

_See? You’re a brat. You still suck your thumb. I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone--_

_I don’t. I just chew it sometimes._

 

“Amras?”

It’s Caranthir. His square jaw is clenched tight. His eyes are puffy. Caranthir _has_ been crying. Have they all?

“I want to go down to the lake,” Amras says. It isn’t a mirror, but maybe it would do.

Caranthir stares at him. He folds his lip between his teeth. “Amras, it’s late. You should--”

“Sleep?” (A little shrill again.)

 

_A single bullet--_

 

“ _Maitimo_ ,” Celegorm gasps, jolting upwards and awake. “ _Maitimo._ ”


	4. Celegorm

_Celegorm squints at the dandelion blow of sawdust, pretending not to care about Maedhros’s appreciative whistle._

_He cares about it immensely._

_"Obliterated," Maedhros drawls, intentionally at his most Irish._

_Celegorm smirks and reaches in the sack at his feet for another target, little larger than an apple. "C’mon, Huan," he says, to where the dog is panting patiently with his head on his paws. "You can trot along for this part."_

_Huan springs to his feet._

_"Try two hundred paces, sharpshooter," Maedhros calls. The wind is flitting in the trees, and in Maedhros’s hair--hair that the sun’s sharpness really does turn near-scarlet, haloed gold like one of Mother’s leafed icons._

_"Tell the rest of them to get their arses out here," Celegorm scoffs, traipsing back to their firing line when he has replaced the burst sacks with fresh ones. They’ll turn to pistols later; for now they’ve been laboring towards perfection with the long rifles. "Mags and Carrie are fit to bobble the thing out of their hands or shoot themselves in the face." He scratches his neck, hot under his hair. "Mags probably can’t bear more weight than a lady’s fingers."_

_It’s Maedhros’s turn to smirk. "Don’t underestimate the weight of a lady’s fingers, properly applied."_

_Celegorm laughs, retaking his position and pointing for Huan to stay. "I’ll trust your word on that."_

_The gunblast is, in this moment, a thunderous, wondrous sound. There is more sawdust on the breeze, because two hundred paces is nothing, to the two of them._

_"Maitimo?"_

_Maedhros hasn’t fired his shot._

_"Look, it’s Fingon!" he cries, and he shades his eyes with one long hand as he stares up the crabappled drive._

_Celegorm curses under his breath._

 

His chest burns as if an army of wasps are marching over it, and his head aches fearfully. As for his mouth, it tastes like swamp scum.

Long ago Celegorm waded too far into the sucking mud of a woodland pond, hunting canny brown frogs--and caught off-balance, he pitched face-forward into the silty depths.

He had felt a wild thumping pulse of panic, trying to get out again.

 

_A single bullet to ruin that lovely face--_

 

His mouth tastes like someone else’s blood.

The room is spinning around him but it still smells of Mithrim. Stone, dust, men, smoke...and a little sweetgrass.

Celegorm was not in Mithrim when--

_He should not be in Mithrim at all._

"Maitimo," he rasps, over his dried-blood tongue. "Maitimo."

 

Maglor’s eyes were hard like Athair’s. Maglor put his hand on Celegorm’s hand, put Celegorm’s hand on Celegorm’s knife, and nodded.

There is only one thing that Maglor and Celegorm share, beyond their parents’ uneasy blood: they would do anything for Maedhros.

Christ, he’d do anything for Maedhros.

 

"You were poisoned," Curufin is saying excitedly, squeezing his hand. "You were poisoned, it’s alright now."

Celegorm tears himself from his little brother’s smothering grip, from the _goddamn_ tangle of bed-sheets that seem to have a stranglehold on his legs.

One look at Maglor’s face tells him he’s too late.

 

Wasps may be swarming and the room may be tilting; the room may be _roaring,_ but afterwards he’ll know it was himself. Celegorm the brash, rising not early enough. Storming at Maglor as if that could turn back time.

 _Fuck, if I thought that’s what you meant, thought you meant_ not saving him--

“You almost died,” Maglor snaps, reed-thin and always such a coward. “And as for Bauglir’s messenger--it was a good deed, killing her.”

“A good deed by my hand, you mean. Could not have done it yourself.” Celegorm’s knuckles nearly crack in his fists. Yes, _that_ he remembers--the spurt and spill of hot blood. What that woman did to--to Maitimo, what she would have done again, is something that has no word in the wasp-swarm of Celegorm’s mind.

The only word he has for her is _death_.

 

_Any number of ravines to throw the body--_

 

“I am the second-eldest,” Maglor croaks. “And it is my duty--”

“You put his blood on _my_ hands. His blood on all our hands.” Celegorm swallows hard. There is a hand here, too, on his shoulder, that isn’t even Maglor’s--Maglor’s are too busy fighting to loose Celegorm’s from his collar.

“Celegorm.” Curufin speaks in his ear.

(Curufin told him to wait, while the woman prattled on. Curufin told him to _wait_.)

 

 _Isn’t that enough?_ Maedhros’s voice, from long ago. _We are in a far better position to betray_ him _._

 

“Maedhros is gone,” says Curufin. Level and flat and almost _warm_ , as though he speaks with conviction hard-won and dearly held. “Celegorm, we did our best.”

Is this Celegorm’s best?

He releases Maglor. Maglor and his _duty_. Maglor second-eldest, who never cared for younger brothers much before.

Should it be satisfying, to see how Maglor crumbles as paper does to ash, when a flame is taken to it?

Should Celegorm be viciously _glad_ , that Maglor’s face twists in anguish? This is the Maglor who thrust him into battle, again and again as Maedhros never _asked_ \--Maglor the murderer, truly now that he has killed their own kin.

 

Celegorm has a twisted heart, he supposes, if he dares to think of hearts of all. He is bitterly jealous, but he has a right to be.

(What good was Maglor to Maedhros, in the end? What good Fingon?)

 

There is a boy who likes catching frogs in the mud. A boy who does not attend to his schoolbooks. A boy who finds his father’s radiance too bright to long endure.

 _Celegorm_ , Mother used to ask, when he had a mother. _How did you come by your hair like the sun?_

 

The skin on his chest is stiff and searing, still. A deep cat-scratch pricked with poison. A small price to pay, for seeing that lifeless body at his feet.

His head swims. Nonetheless, he stoops for his boots. Takes the shirt that Curufin hands him. Curufin does so reverently. It’s one of--

It’s one of Athair’s shirts.

This is Athair’s room.

“How long?” he grits out, tying his boots.

“It has not been two days.”

It is night, and it _was_ night then, and _oh, Maitimo_ \--

Celegorm almost says, _he’s not dead yet_ , but he knows. He _knows_ that Maedhros died when he slashed that bitch clean across her gullet. Knows that three days will--will pass quickly. Too quickly for him to do much of anything, save ride to the end of the world.

(When he found Amrod’s body, the world ended anyway. Now he is plucked up again, like a mobile corpse, and made to live the life of a boy with the sun in his hair, though he wants it not.)

 

“You know,” he says to Maglor, very cruelly, “They will not kill him gently.”

Maglor is weeping. He shudders behind his fingers, which cover his eyes.

Curufin is breathing too quickly beside Celegorm. Caranthir and Amras are like stiff wooden dolls.

_Pluck up._

Celegorm has no gun in his hands, but many targets. Many targets, and the memory of so much scarlet blood.

“Do you really think they’ll let him die unscathed? You say we saved him from one fate. I’ll put forth another--carved into fucking bits by that fur-trapping bastard. They’re not hunters, Maglor. She wasn’t a hunter. They--”

Amras, in his horror, looks like Amrod once did. Like Amrod _might_ have, just before--

“Don’t follow me,” Celegorm snarls. “None of you, I swear to God, I’ll break bones.”

 

Mithrim’s stones are cold at night. He held a gun to a target here, and it was a man. Who saved him then?

When will he learn that it was never about salvation?

 

In his own quarters--the room he shared with half his brothers, when his brothers were _here_ \--he roots about for his weapons. He finds his gun. He does not know where he is going.

_Oh, Celegorm, sometimes it does not matter what you do._

_Sometimes God says it is time--_

_\--for a thing to die._

 

His gun is at his hip, now, and his knife, too. Someone cleaned his knife. Was that--it must have been Curufin, or if Curufin would not leave his bedside...Caranthir?

He will make no apologies to the faceless skies. Make no apologies to Maitimo. _Maedhros_ in death: eldest and leader and--

No apologies. If he opens his mouth he’ll be Maglor, tears and cowardice.

Never enough.

 _Sometimes God says it is time_ , Mother told him, but what if there is no God at all?

 

“Night watch only,” the guard at the door says roughly. Celegorm wonders if this man knows him. He doesn’t remember this dull, ugly face.

“Feanor’s boys may pass.” Ulfang melts from the dark hall, Ulfang whom Maedhros and Maglor both thanked. Celegorm sneers.

 _I’ll kill you,_ he wants to say, speeding off across the court-yard without so much as a nod to Mithrim’s captain. _I’ll fill your skull, all your skulls, with lead and never look back._

 _Wait_ , said Curufin.

 

_Wait._

 

The night wraps round like a cloak. How was he supposed to know that it would be Amrod first, then Maedhros? And Athair in between-- _there’s_ a loss Celegorm hasn’t parsed yet. But he’s not Curufin, and he’s damn selfish.

Selfish as they all are, except for the ones gone.

Curufin can’t live without Athair and Maglor can’t live without Maedhros and Amras can’t live without Amrod and...

Celegorm doesn’t think he wants to live.

Amrod is dead. The woman who turned Maedhros into a frightened animal, for a time and for, in some ways, _always_ , is dead. These things make all and none of the difference.

 

 _I love you_ , Maedhros whispered, as Athair’s spirit left him. Curufin’s whole being was tearing those same words out like stitches, even if he didn’t say them.

They are nothing alike.

 

Celegorm looks at Mithrim in the dark, the crouched stones and the bullet-hole stars and the way the mountains are a different depth but not a different color.

“Celegorm,” says Curufin.

“I said I’d break your bones.”

Curufin shrugs. He is a whip-thin, whip-smart scrap of nothing. He’s the only one Celegorm doesn’t have to protect unless he _wants_ to.

And he wants to.

 

(Nothing alike.)

(Sometimes that’s the only way out.)

 

“You can shoot me if you like,” Curufin suggests mildly. “We’re all wanting it, a little.”

Because Athair and Maedhros and Amrod--

“I’m going for a walk,” Celegorm says. That moment. _That’s_ like giving up.

 

_Three days..._

 

There are guards at the perimeter, guards by the bridge, guards by the gate.

They don’t talk about that.

There is just the sound of their boots and Celegorm’s pulse in his ears, and then Curufin’s hand settles (soundlessly, of course) on his arm.

“Please,” Curufin says, voice catching in his throat as if swallowed. “Not that way.”

Celegorm, without thinking, had turned their path towards the far meadow, towards the soft new mound of earth under which lies Athair.

“Ah.” He clears his throat.

“I can’t.” Curufin is shaking his head and his eyes shine in the dark. Curufin doesn’t weep, exactly. Tears take him, sometimes, or hang on his lashes like stars, until his heat (Athair’s heat) can scorch them away. “I can’t.”

“But you’ll heap shit on Maedhros’s memory, is that it?” Celegorm doesn’t snap. Not fighting, not really. “Don’t pretend you won’t.”

“Of course I will.” Curufin drags the edge of his sleeve over nose and mouth. Sniffs.

Celegorm is of two minds: drag Curufin to the heap of earth to see what will come of it, or have mercy.

Sometimes it is time to let a thing go.

 

He’s only ever known people who didn’t understand that. Maitimo-- _Maedhros_ \--most of all.

“I wish they’d given us his body,” Celegorm says.

“They wouldn’t. They didn’t.” Curufin shivers in the cool black air. “You know that.”

Celegorm knows everything and nothing, and that is something Maedhros _would_ understand.

 

The stars aren’t fit to look through. Aren’t the accomplishment or passage of anything else.

And Maedhros is gone.


	5. Maglor

If there is an afterlife, this is theirs.

Celegorm and Curufin with him have gone out, folded into the shifted silence of night. Amras, who begged but a few moments ago that a groveling spy should live, who demanded to be brought to Mithrim’s lake as if his life depended on it—Amras is still here.

(Did he want to drown? Amrod drowned. That is what Celegorm said. Said he buried the small body, said—

— _Maitimo is right here_.)

“Maglor,” Caranthir mutters gruffly, his face too broad and red to be a comfort (to look anything like—)

Maglor steps away from him, lost in thought if not in memory.

All the long night, all the ride to Thuringwethil’s false parlay, he could think of nothing but Maedhros past—sweet and young, kind and ever-taller.

Now Maglor can see nothing but Maedhros dying.

 

 _They will bind his hands behind him,_ he decided in grim fascination, as he wrung _his_ chill fingers all the length of Mithrim’s shore. No rope should still those beautiful hands, soft in touch and clever in working, deadly in what Athair ordered them to do. No rough force should lead him to the lip of a precipice, but Maglor saw that too. _They will hold him on either side so that he cannot run. And then they will step aside and he_ will _not run because he is brave_.

_He has always been so brave._

When the shot is fired, his face will be like all the rest, like those that Maedhros killed and Athair killed and Maglor killed while weeping, opened and ugly and—

 _A quick death_ , Maglor prayed miserably, standing on the silvered shore. _Make it a quick death. Like—like the woman promised._

 

Then Celegorm woke, ravening and shattering, and said it was not so.

 

Maglor stands by one of Mithrim’s windows, Athair’s window, and does not wring his hands. Night will soon pass to morning, and when another day is spent so shall hope be, down, down to the last twisted penny.

There are no memories because there is nothing left of New York’s dandified musician and his elder brother shining like a young god. Nothing left of the Formenos boys, dancing their riotous ceilis and whispering their innocent prayers. Ten years or ten hours seem to matter equally, in that both have been stretched too thin.

Athair brought them to this barren land of heartbreak, and left them there. Maedhros tried to save them in the old way, in the way of a body on an altar. It did, Maglor sees, no good.

What did Athair leave? What did Maedhros save?

 

The bedclothes, soiled by sweat and mud, are still where Celegorm cast them. Nothing about this room shall remain as it was before the clock-tick grind of hour after potent hour.

But if Maglor never goes back to—

 

 _Mairon_. Mairon will not grant him the mercy of a bullet, Thuringwethil, while she lived, had said as much. _Farewell him properly._

Maedhros endured relentless miles and unyielding burdens. When Maglor’s harp was broken, it was Maedhros who told him to carry on. Maedhros who told him that he must.

And yet Maedhros picked at his food and barely slept. Maedhros wept after the massacre at Ulmo’s Bridge.

If they torment him before he dies, Maglor cannot say how Maedhros will bear it.

 _And I? How will_ I _bear it?_

His cláirseach rests in pieces against the wall of their (his) room. He has not tried to have it mended. Indeed, he has not sung for months; has not _wanted_ to since Christmastide.

 

“Excuse me, young sir.”

The door has creaked open and it is Ulfang again. Maglor is weary of his caterpillar brows and the quiet, dire news he always seems to bring, but Maglor knows (better than Celegorm will) what good it does to keep peace.

Curufin says he understands also; Maglor knows not what to make of Curufin.

But here Maglor is, with Caranthir and Amras the only ones left who look _to_ him, and the room is square and grey-walled just as before. (No clock. There is no clock.)

All the pain of imagined deaths will not unmake these stones or moments.

“What is it?” Maglor asks—Maglor who knows not how to lead.

“The young lads have gone out to wander the grounds,” Ulfang says. “I bid the guards to let them pass. I think you and I ought to speak, quite friendly, yet soon.”

Caranthir makes a sound like a low growl in his throat. If Huan was still beside them, Maglor would have thought it came _from_ Huan.

(Huan went out, just before Amras dashed in with the town-girl. Huan padded quietly by, a long wolf-shadow, sniffing the air as if he scouted for danger. He has not come back. Did he hear his master’s voice from afar, though he was not at Celegorm’s side for Celegorm’s waking?)

 

Maglor does not know if they will ever be beside each other properly again. Curufin hid from him in the mines, in those days when Celegorm and Caranthir and Amras were abroad.

Celegorm came back with eyes as flat as river-stones, and now the river has answered why.

“Maglor.” That voice again.

It is not Maglor’s strength, to _stay_ in any one place or time or role. What is he, without the steadying height of Maedhros to guide him?

“My brothers have gone out,” he answers Ulfang, keeping his voice as courteous as he can. His voice, too, is nothing like New York. It is not melodious, it is thin. If he _tried_ to sing, here, would anything...would anything... “What of it? Did they cause trouble with your men?”

Ulfang shakes his head. There are no chairs for them to easily sit upon; there is only one chair in Athair’s _—C_ _urufin’s_ —room. Maglor will not offer it to Ulfang; not because he has any _reason_ to dislike the man, but because he is so tired his eyelids drag down over his stinging eyes.

All he can remind himself is that Celegorm said he had to be stronger than the children.

“No trouble,” Ulfang tells him. “Not as now. But...your father’s men will look to you, and Rumil’s to me, and I’d like to think we can keep things a mite in harmony. Would you like that, too?”

“Of course,” Maglor answers, stupidly. He isn’t Celegorm. He isn’t threatening to shoot everyone in sight.

(He isn’t Celegorm. He stopped trying to save Maedhros as soon as his hooves clattered over the bridge.)

 

“He’s just on his feet,” Ulfang says, with a glance at the rumpled bed that makes it plain he is speaking of Celegorm. “I understand he’s tetchy. Speak with him, would you? Have a friendly word, same as this.”

Maglor nods.

“My men'll give you and your brothers a wide berth, as wide as I can make it. I’m only asking that you be civil.”

 _Civil. Celegorm._ “Yes, we can manage that.”

“Very good.” Ulfang smiles awkwardly. Perhaps he knows that Athair died here. Perhaps he waited in the hall like some of the others, slipping away so as not to be seen. “Who knows when the orcs and such’ll come back,” Ulfang points out, after a lull. “There may be fighting, and we’ll need a strong front for that. All together. All as one...”

 _Of course,_ Maglor thinks numbly. _We are in danger because Athair burned their headquarters to the ground, because we killed their men._

They are outlaws twice-over, now; it may not be long before the regiment is backed by men other than Gothmog’s, other than Bauglir’s, even, though the Irishman is dead.

(Athair is dead. It feels like a century ago.)

(It is not Maglor’s _strength,_ time—)

 

Ulfang’s boots slap against the flagstones in the hall.

“Curufin say we shouldn’t trust him,” Caranthir whispers. Amras is biting his nails and squinting out the window.

What is it that Amras wants, beyond the obvious?

(What else does Maglor want than that?)

 

He has no right to remember—anything.

_They won’t offer him a blindfold. You knew that. But what if she lied altogether? What if they don’t even end it with a gun?_

_They could give him a choice between the gun and a knife. Between the gun and a noose._

“You two should sleep,” he says, rather than answering Caranthir. Curufin’s thoughts on Ulfang are immaterial; Curufin hasn’t trusted anyone for a long time. Even Curufin’s love of Athair was more like paranoid worship than anything; he seemed half-certain that Athair would turn away from him, towards someone else.

 _Towards Maedhros_.

 

Maglor prods for a memory. None rise; they are as hidden as his voice.

(His brothers will not sleep soundly in the hours left of night. He knows that. Of course he does.)

If Celegorm and Curufin can pass outside the walls of Mithrim, so can he. Morning is pinking the sky’s pinned corners when Maglor crosses past the heap of split, stacked wood. The sky is so often soft, here, in a way that the tall tales of wild Western blue did not preserve.

No gaudiness; frail beauty.

Maglor feels hot under his dirt-stiff shirt. His boots are molded over his feet with that kind of raw-hide fragility that wet leather has when it dries too slowly.

He was not cautious, by the lake.

 

 _Careful, Macalaure, don’t spoil your new_ —

 

He pauses with the fort to his back, the fort still close enough to be _behind him_ , to wrap around him like destiny. He prods, and doesn’t remember.

On lower ground than the main structure, but still tucked conservatively back from the river, from the border to the enemy world, is Mithrim’s stable.

 

Who is Maglor now? Celegorm, seeking comfort from a beast, a beast that came back? Or Caranthir, who wears his heart on his sleeve and his pain on his face? Surely he cannot be Curufin, Athair’s lonely chisel, tossed aside by miscounted confidence. And he is neither his godson nor his dead baby brother, because they are (were) both too _young_ for this, and if Maglor knows anything it is that he should be _old enough._

(Maglor will never be Maedhros.)

 

Someone has curried Alexander; cleaned the mud and froth-sweat from his mane and tail and coat, has brushed him until that glassy look of flight has faded from his eyes.

How many times did Maglor stand at Maedhros’s side, admiring his brother’s sympathy for the bizarrely noble beast that towered over them both? How many times did Maglor ask questions, all of which Maedhros answered patiently?”

There is nobody else in the stable. Alexander nibbles contendedly, and Maglor strokes the forelock that twists, almost in a ringlet—

—almost like a lock of hair.

“Mother said I wouldn’t sleep unless Maitimo held me,” Maglor murmurs. “When it was just us two. I can—I _know_ I can still remember the smell of him. Lavender, a little, because Mother washed our dresses in it. And—and—”

(He cannot see, as he has always seen. Cannot _think._ )

Alexander whickers softly. Lifts a hoof and sets it down again.

This is patience itself.

Maglor vowed he would not weep again, but then Celegorm was shaking him and shouting about _cut to bits_ , and the tears fell. That is Maglor; tears, falling.

 

So much death.

They all bear the mark of _so much death._

 

“I did what he would have wished, Alexander. I am—my hands are tied. I am the eldest, now.” The words are the most hateful he has ever spoken, for they are soft. They are sky-soft, and they sound like reasoning. They sound like the attempts at logic he used to employ whenever Maedhros was the one distressed. The rare, terribly rare occasions when _Maedhros_ needed comforting.

It doesn’t matter, who they were then.

 

Maglor was not made for time.


End file.
